Tag: guide

The holy season of Lent begins in just a few short weeks on Valentines Day, if you can believe it. Even if you can’t quite fathom this holy and profane confusion, get ready. Easter will fall on April Fools Day six weeks later.

Maybe it’s appropriate for this year in American Christianity where we are not quite sure how to define the sacred from the patriotic. Maybe it is a challenge to us to move past the rhetoric from the White House to define what needs to be restored, renewed or even resurrected not just for ourselves but for our world.

Several years ago, with the good people in the First Congregational Church UCC in South Portland, Maine, I wrote a curriculum that reflected this desire. They wanted to experience this thing. They wanted the resurrection to come alive not just in their lives but in the world. They were looking for hope when the world was still frozen and nothing would ever grow.

We created this guide which we called Toward Transformation through the Psalms to imagine such a possibility, but we were careful not to get too stuck on the thing that happens to Jesus. We didn’t want to get lost in the particulars that may or may not have made it a bodily resurrection. We are, after all, a diverse people in the United Church of Christ and this is always a question. Instead, we wanted to take it into our own bodies and look for change.

We all agreed we hated change, even if we knew it was good for us. It was hard and it was unlikely any one of us was going to choose it even if we knew full well that the very good news we proclaimed pivots on the hope that people can and will change. So we set aside Lent to understand this about ourselves so that we might see it in the world. It wasn’t a hope to make Christianity or even ourselves great again. We weren’t looking to capture something from the past but to repent or turn around to be changed.

Years have passed but as the calendar changes to approach Lent, I always return to this guide. There was something amazing that happened within those six weeks. We broke through the noise and got real about our hopes. We were changed by the way that we shared our struggles and our slow movements toward change and Easter was different. We were different and it’s why I want to offer it to other groups seeking such a possibility. I want you to have this experience. You’ll find the whole resource with leader notes and a weekly group discussion reflecting upon the Psalms here.

Take a step Toward Transformation this Lent and download this guide today. If you have any questions or want to know if your group really needs to follow this guide exactly as written, please contact me. I’d love to share this wonderful experience with you.

I aspire to write other resources for group exploration when I’m not so busy cooking up this baby but in the meantime, you might be interested to find what else is currently in my kitchen. However you might choose to explore this holy season of Lent, may it be blessed.